In a world where high-speed neutrinos and melting ice caps hog the limelight, it’s sometimes nice to pay tribute to the sillier side of science. Because for every Einstein there’s a physicist trying to understand why toast always lands butter-side down; for every Darwin, a biologist who studies fish farts.
Once a year, scientists come together to honour the unsung heroes of science, awarding ‘Ig Nobel’ prizes to achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. A parody of the Nobel Prizes, these awards celebrate science that is eccentric, bizarre, or just downright ridiculous – studies “that cannot, or should not, be reproduced”.
The Ig Nobel awards – making people laugh, and then making them think (credit: Improbable Research)
I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about the Ig Nobels for a while. So, here it is at last – a rundown of my all-time favourite prizewinners. Happy holidays! (more…)
“Out, you green-sickness carrion,” bellowed Capulet to a Romeo-smitten Juliet. “Out, you baggage! You tallow-face!”
Swear words may have evolved since Shakespeare’s day, but cursing has never gone out of fashion. Today, we swear when we stub our toe, we cuss when the GPS sends us down a dead end, and we take God’s name in vain when our computer crashes for the fifth time in a row. In other words, we utter expletives to express sentiments that milder words simply wouldn’t do justice to.
It is estimated that around 0.5% of words in typical everyday speech are swear words. Given an average rate of 15,000 words spoken in a day, this amounts to an impressive 75 daily profanities – a figure that even Captain Haddock would be proud of. (more…)
Sigmund Freud claimed that they reveal our innermost desires, Gabrielle never stopped insisting that they can come true, and Inception piled on so many layers of them that by the end of the film things were all getting a bit silly.
Whether we like it or not, we all have dreams once we enter the Land of Nod. Dreams have the power to inspire us, frighten us, and make us vow never again to scoff Cheddar before bedtime. In the 2006 film, The Science of Sleep, Stéphane gave his own cutely original explanation of what goes on in our heads when we dream…
There is, believe it or not, a branch of science dedicated purely to dreaming: oneirology. It turns out that understanding how and why we dream is a preoccupation of experts in neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and a lot more -ologies besides.
During childhood, many people have particularly vivid dreams – sometimes recurrent – that leave a lasting impression. These early reveries can help scientists to understand why we dream, as well as revealing more about the development of human consciousness.
Childhood dreams were of great interest to the two big guns of dream psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) and Carl Jung (1875 – 1961). Freud believed that they provide evidence for his ‘wish fulfillment’ theory, where dreams are our unconscious attempts to satisfy impulses and needs.
Dream brothers...Freud and Jung
On the other hand, Jung believed that childhood dreams are related to the ‘collective unconscious’, a universal consciousness that has no relation to personal experiences, but is a kind of repository of worldly knowledge. For Jung, then, childhood dreams are often highly significant, with intense imagery and connections to religious and mythological themes.
A few years ago, Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, a self-confessed dream nerd, led a study into childhood reveries, asking eighty-five adults in a rural area of northeast America to recall the very first dream that they remember having.
After separating the dreams into categories (e.g. ‘mystical’, ‘family’, ‘threatening’, ‘wish fulfillment’), the overwhelming picture was that of a very unhappy slumberland: three-quarters of the dreams were nightmares, with the most common theme being threats from creatures such as the Bogeyman, Frankenstein’s monster, ghosts, and a mysterious wolf:
"I had a dream about a wolf standing on the edge of my bed..." Credit: Brad Wenner
“I had a dream about a wolf standing on the edge of my bed with his forepaws on the brown metal frame. He was just looking at me. He made a noise similar to a low growl but it was not menacing. He climbed onto the bed. I woke up, frightened in real life.” (Dream 11, from an 11-year-old girl).
Other common nightmarish themes included threats to family members and the feeling of being lost in a strange, abstract environment, as in Dream 18 from a 5-year-old boy:
“I am in the fields, like the poppy fields in The Wizard of Oz. It is light out. I hear booms from a cannon or something. I do not recall anyone else being there but I remember being alone in the field. That was the scary part…the aloneness.”
"I am in the fields, like the poppy fields in The Wizard of Oz..." Credit: Trapac
Happily, a quarter of the dreams were lighter in tone. These included fantasies about wish fulfillment and spiritual beings, as well as lucid sensations of flying.
So do these childhood dreams agree with the theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud? Well, yes and no, according to Bulkeley and friends. Although there were some ‘wish fulfillment’ dreams, Freud’s theory cannot account for the full range of dream imagery: “children’s imaginations are capable of more complex thought and creative expression than Freud gave them credit for”.
Jung fares better: his assertion that childhood dreams are intensely memorable ‘big dreams’ is backed up by the vivid accounts of the participants. Several dreams also contained religious elements, such as appearances by Jesus and Mary. However, the weakness in Jung’s theory is that it is rather ambiguous and cannot really be disconfirmed.
The large number of threatening situations in these dreams may also support the theory of another psychologist, Antti Revonsuo, who believes that the primary function of nightmares is to prepare us for threats in the real world. He would argue that we are more likely to experience these nightmares at an early age, when we feel more of a primal threat from the world around us.
Heavy stuff, maybe, but the authors of this study finish with some words of reassurance for parents with young kids: nightmares are a natural part of child development, and discussing them can even help to turn the nightmares around. They give an example of a girl who turned a threatening octopus in one dream into a friendly, huggable octopus in a later dream. Awww.
Right, on that note, I’m off to bed for some quality dreams about affable molluscs…
Bulkeley, K., Broughton, B., Sanchez, A., & Stiller, J. (2005). Earliest Remembered Dreams. Dreaming, 15 (3), 205-222 DOI: 10.1037/1053-0797.15.3.205
I just finished watching this webcast of a très interesting talk given at the Oxford Internet Institute last month by Susan Greenfield, entitled ‘Does the Mind Have a Future?’.
Susan Greenfield at the Oxford Internet Institute, April 2011
The story is that by spending more and more time interacting with screens, rather than other human beings, our brains may be adapting in new ways. Greenfield picks up on one positive effect (higher IQ), and a whole load of negatives (e.g. shorter attention span, less empathy, lower sense of identity).
I don’t know enough about psychology or neuroscience to make an educated comment, but it seems a no-brainer than someone who spends every day reporting their life on Facebook / Twitter is going to miss out on some pretty important features of human interaction (body language, physical contact, eye contact, etc.). On the other hand, I doubt a quick blast on FIFA 2011 or Call of Duty could do too much harm.
When Stephen Fry gave his thoughts on social networking, I loved his comment that certain people were worried when the postbox first came along, because a daughter could send love letters to her sweetheart(s) for the first time without having to pass by her father. Maybe all these fears about information technology’s long-term impacts will prove to be similarly unfounded. Or maybe not. In any case, Susan Greenfield’s talk is really thought-provoking. Right…better finish this blog post before another brain cell dies!
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